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Mark Your Calendars: Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

From October 8–12, 2025, Newark Arts Festival will transform the city into a living canvas of art, music, and culture. This year’s theme, JOY, celebrates its power as a bold and transformative force—one that uplifts, empowers, and connects us all.

JOY is not frivolous. It is strength, harmony, and revolutionary change. This October, the festival invites us to embrace JOY in its fullest sense, through exhibitions, live performances, thought-provoking talks, family-friendly programming, and more.

I’m honored to be showing work in two venues this year:

Newark Museum of Art

49 Washington St, Newark, NJ
Works on view: Classic LBD & Boa Quill (2 of 5)

These works address the insidious weight of microaggressions, those subtle, often unconscious insults that people of color experience in everyday life.

  • Have you been followed by security while shopping?
  • Asked to prove you “belong” in your own home or garage?
  • Mistaken for “the help” in a store or restaurant?
  • Or expected to represent “all Black Americans” when the only person of color in a room?

These furtive slights accumulate into stress, anger, frustration, and invisibility. Classic LBD recasts the timeless “little black dress” as armor against microaggressions, while Boa Quill expands this conversation, transforming stereotype and bias into a statement of resistance and resilience.

Boa Quill
Theda Sandiford
100′ of slip half hitched chain black glitter 1/4” cotton rope, knotted with ribbon, recycled sari ribbon, acrylic yarn, pearls and 8” zip ties on bamboo ring.
60 x 14 x 4 in
2021
Classic LBD
Theda Sandiford
Recycled fishing net, ribbon, paracord and handmade jewelry on dressform
46 x 20 x 6 in
2020

Express Newark

54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ
Work on view: Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart

This piece transforms a reclaimed shopping cart, wrapped in woven New York Post newspaper sleeves, into a vessel of joyful resistance. BAD NEWS becomes reimagined as beauty, hope, and empowerment, an act of flipping the narrative.

Joyful resistance is about reclaiming space, finding connection, and celebrating resilience in the face of adversity. It is about holding onto vision and possibility, even when challenged by oppressive forces. By weaving the mundane into the extraordinary, this cart becomes both a shield and a beacon, carrying stories of survival and transformation.

Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart Theda Sandiford Bike reflectors and bell, paracord, Fresh Direct bag yarn, doggie poop bags, plastic newspaper bags and plastic grocery bags woven on gold spray painted recovered shopping cart. 36 x 40 x 24 in 2021

Come Celebrate JOY

Newark Arts Festival 2025 is an invitation to see Newark in full, vibrant color. Whether you are deeply rooted in the arts or simply curious, come celebrate JOY as the heartbeat of the community.

📅 October 8–12, 2025
📍 Newark Museum of Art & Express Newark

What’s your JOY?

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Work In Progress: Wash Woman’s Rites

This mop, once a tool of labor, is now a symbol of resistance.

Knots of yarn and thread echo the rhythm of praying a rosary, each knot a meditation, each pull a remembrance. Soon, crystals will be sewn into the bottom of the mop, grounding its transformation from utility to ceremony.

Theda Sandiford
Wash Woman’s Rites
Upcycled mop, acrylic yarn, embroidery thread and gold leaf.
60 x 12 x 5 inAugust 2025
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St. Hildegard of Bingen: Mystic, Maker, Medicine Woman

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German mystic, composer, writer, healer, and abbess, one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. A visionary and Doctor of the Church, she integrated spiritual insight with music, natural medicine, and ecological wisdom.

She authored major theological works based on her visions, composed over 70 original chants (writing both music and lyrics), and produced texts on healing, botany, and natural history. Hildegard’s holistic approach saw the body, mind, and spirit as deeply interconnected, and her remedies drew from plants, food, and elements of nature.

Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in her world listening to her celestial chants, reading her herbal remedies, testing her recipes, and studying her illuminations. Her work is more than historical, it feels like a living lineage, a call to remember the sacred intelligence of the body, the earth and spirit.

A fierce intellect and spiritual force, Hildegard spoke truth to power and left behind a body of work that still inspires mystics, artists, and healers like me today.

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Fall 2025 Exhibitions: Newark & San Diego

This fall promises to be a vibrant season of art, travel, and community. I’m thrilled to share two major opportunities where my work will be on view in Newark and San Diego.

Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

October 8–12, 2025
📍 Newark Museum of Art, 49 Washington St, Newark, NJ
📍 Express Newark, 54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ

This year’s Newark Arts Festival embraces JOY as a radical, transformative force—one that uplifts, empowers, and connects us. I’m honored to be showing in two venues:

  • Newark Museum of Art – Classic LBD & Boa Quill
    These works address the invisible weight of microaggressions, recasting the iconic little black dress as armor and weaving narratives of resilience and defiance into fiber form.
  • Express Newark – Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart
    Woven from recycled New York Post sleeves on a reclaimed shopping cart, this piece transforms bad news into joyful resistance, reclaiming space and rewriting the narrative.

Interpretations 2025

October 17, 2025 – January 10, 2026
📍 Visions Museum of Textile Art, 2825 Dewey Rd #100, San Diego, CA

Hot on the heels of Newark, I’ll be heading to San Diego for Interpretations 2025. This exhibition brings together textile artists from around the world to explore innovation, tradition, and storytelling through fiber.

  • Festival Days: October 17–18
  • Special Events: Award & Donor Party (Oct 17) and Artists’ Talks & Dinner (Oct 18)

I’m honored to have my work included in this gathering of visionaries at the Visions Museum of Textile Art, where the boundaries of fiber art continue to be pushed and redefined.

Looking Ahead

September and October will be a whirlwind of celebration, and connection. I look forward to sharing moments from both Newark and San Diego as these works take on new life in community.

Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes updates, and if you’re in either city, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating the power of textiles, storytelling, and JOY.

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August Reflections: Rediscovering Time Capsules

August has been a month of introspection and growth. I’ve been returning to old techniques with fresh eyes, particularly 2D mixed media works on paper. For a recent birthday activation, I created a series of Masquerade Masks and found myself diving deep into my archive, sorting through old monoprints, tissue prints, handmade papers, magazine tears, postcards, early collages, and ephemera I had tucked away and forgotten.

In the process, I stumbled across a time capsule I set aside in 1995. Inside were treasures I hadn’t expected: rare photos of my father smiling, fragments of memory, and traces of ideas that still pulse through my work today. What once felt like discarded experiments now read as early whispers of themes that continue to guide me; ancestral spiritual practices, cosmic geometry, abstraction, African masks, adornment, and divine intervention.

Funny how time reshapes our perspective. Works that seemed incomplete years ago now feel like essential threads in my practice. The textures, patterns, and iconography I once set aside have returned, asking to be seen anew, insisting on their place in the conversation of my work.

I am still processing these rediscoveries, letting memory and material speak. I look forward to seeing how my hands guide me as these old forms weave themselves into the present moment.

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Salting Grief and Grace

In both Japanese funerary rites and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, salt is a sacred purifier, used to ward off evil spirits and cleanse the lingering energy of death. Whether sprinkled outside the home after a funeral or offered at an ancestral altar, salt marks the boundary between the living and the dead. I grew up throwing salt over my shoulder, into fire, or into moving water, a ritual of release and banishment, echoing traditions that span oceans and generations.

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Illuminations and New Sight

Ever since I got my new reading glasses, I’ve been powering through my reading list with fresh eyes, literally and spiritually. This morning, I finished Illuminations by Mary Sharratt, a luminous novel about Saint Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic, composer, healer, and visionary.

Magical vocal arrangements

Her story is so inspiring. Hildegard’s fierce devotion to divine creativity, her bold voice in a patriarchal world, and her communion with the natural world, echo so much of what I’ve been reaching for in my own practice. Her visions, wild, vivid, unapologetically feminine, remind me that there is sacred power in speaking what only you can see.

Hildegard’s legacy is a radiant thread in the life I’m building now, of ritual, plant medicine, and ancestral memory. I didn’t expect a book to shift my inner tempo, but Illuminations has done just that. More soon. There’s work to do in the garden.

Theda

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Twisted Witness: Work In Progress

So far, I’ve been working with recovered marine line, sea tumbled, woven and knotted with yarn and hand made cordage. Next, I move on too beading and button embellishment.

Each twist channels the raw tension of being dismissed,
of time stolen by those who don’t listen,
of vision ignored until echoed by another voice,
suddenly heard, suddenly valid,
but not mine.

This vessel holds that frustration.
It binds the silence I am forced to swallow
into something visible, undeniable,
a net of memory and resistance,
tangled, resilient, and true.

Recovered marine line, sea tumbled, woven and knotted with yarn and hand made cordage.